


Dread Surgery

by al_fa



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2016-04-08
Packaged: 2018-06-01 01:36:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6495625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/al_fa/pseuds/al_fa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Short story detailing an earlier experiment by the Dread Doctors and the scars it left on their victim.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dread Surgery

_He struggled against the leather straps holding him to the table, but they did not give. Thin and tough, they cut into his limbs, stopping the circulation. He could feel the trademark sign of oxygen deprivation in his arms: numbness and tingling._

_If he had been able to turn his head, he might have seen the veins on his arms bulge out, the skin taking on an unnatural purple tinge. Restrained as he was, he saw only the bright yellow lights of a surgical lamp blinding him. His heart raced and cold sweat covered his skin. This, right here, was his worst nightmare: Helpless, tied to the operating table, about to be operated on by a doctor he did not know or trust._

_"Our patient is awake." The voice buzzed maliciously. "Let the surgery commence." As Gabriel realized there was not going to be any anesthesia, he lost his last shred of hope._

 

He woke up screaming, his head pounding in agony.

"What's wrong, honey?"

It took Gabriel a second to recognize the voice. He was lying next to his wife, and it was in the middle of the night. He was safe.

"Nothing. Just that nightmare again."

"Again? The operation was 16 years ago, wasn't it?"

"17. Everything went well and I recovered perfectly." It had been an almost saccharine success story: A teenager saved by a heart transplant which inspired him to become a surgeon as well. "Why the hell do I still have nightmares?"

"Oh, honey. It was a new procedure at the time, and everyone told you your chances weren't great. It must have been traumatic, going under without knowing if you would ever wake up again."

"Just go back to sleep. I'm sorry for making you worry."

With the way his head pounded, Gabriel did not think he would get any more sleep that night. He went into the bathroom, staring sullenly at the bags under his eyes, when he noticed the thin trickle of dark dried blood under his nose. As he washed his face, worrying about chronic nose bleeds becoming a problem in addition to his headaches and nightmares, he had the most incongruous idea of his life.

"I should write a book."

 

When his wife got up in the morning, she found him at his desk, with pages strewn all about, covered with messy notes.

"Oh my. What happened here?"

Gabriel smiled, but his eyes looked tired. "Inspiration, I guess. Please don't read it, though. Those are just my notes, and I don't want to show you anything but a finished draft."

"I don't believe it. YOU are writing a novel?"

"Unlikely, isn't it? It must have been a decade since I've last read a piece of fiction."

"Well, I'll believe it when I read it. Shouldn't you be on your way to work by now?"

Gabriel glanced at his watch. "It's eight already? I really lost track of time."

 

From that night on, the novel began to eat his time. It seemed as though every waking thought that passed through his head concerned the plot, the characters or the setting of his work. As soon as he came home from work, he would sit down and hammer away at the keyboard. Sometimes he wrote deep into the night, driven by a creativity he had not yet known existed inside him.

Soon, he noticed a trend in his writing style. When he plotted ahead, thinking about character growth, themes and motives of his story, he wrote badly. "Uninspired drivel", he complained once to his wife. She didn't answer, or if she did, he didn't hear it. He was already writing the next attempt to finish the scene, this time without any aim or goal in mind, guided only by his impulse. When he wrote like that, he liked what he produced. It was still undoubtedly bad, with stilted prose, awkward exposition and wooden dialogues. He, however, felt a truth in it, something that made it more real in a way he could hardly describe. He was no expert wordsmith and he knew it, but he would bring his tale to paper, and if others could see past its stylistic flaws, he hoped they would see what had kept him bound to the keyboard.

 

_A figure bent over him. He could only see outlines against the bright light, but there was something utterly wrong with it. When it straightened again, light reflected from lenses, tubes and dull metal. His doctor was wearing a mask. He tried to sit up, to protest, but he was bound and gagged. Cold and heavy fear rose within him._

_"Good condition, if somewhat anemic. This operation should not cause much bleeding in any case."_

_Now Gabriel understood why he heard buzzing in the voice. There must be a voice distortion device in the mask._

_"Wipe."_

_A second person wiped sweat off his brow. It hurt, as though he was being wiped off with a jagged metal bar wrapped into a paper towel, but that was not the worst thing about it. Far worse was the wet feeling of paper against his skin, the coldness of the metal, how real it all felt._

_The first figure was now gripping something that looked like a cross between a steam-powered drill and a medieval torture device. It spun to life with a roar._

_The doctor touched the spinning drill to his forehead, and skin burst._

 

"Gabriel? You woke me up again."

"Sorry." He said it automatically and without meaning, like he had every night for the last week.

"Were are you going?"

As though in a trance, Gabriel hadn't even realized he was standing up. "To the computer. I need to write."

The scenes came together by themselves. A young man strapped to an operating table, masked doctors mutilating him, cutting him open and putting things in his body. He recovers, but he's become something different. A stranger in his body, something which changes him, causes him to kill and maim against his own volition.

When Gabriel turned the screen off, satisfied with the night's writing, he could have sworn he had seen a reflection in the black screen, a dark, masked figure standing directly behind him. He turned around reflexively, but there was nobody. It had to have been a trick of the light, irrelevant in comparison to his latest epiphany: His nightmares would provide fuel for the novel. Fear was oozing from what he had written, scaring even himself. With this inspiration, the book might become greater than he had imagined.

Content, he crawled into bed again.

 

_"Ready the transplant."_

_The doctor took something white and round from a tablet and studied it appreciatively. Gabriel could not see what it was. Tears and blood blurred his vision, the fresh hole in his skull ached and his heart—the donor heart—was beating furiously, as though it was trying to burst out of his chest again._

_The surgeon looked at him and something told Gabriel that the man was smiling under his mask as he pushed the ball into the ragged, bleeding hole in Gabriel's forehead._

_"Transplant complete. Begin suture." Even in the buzzing, distorted voice, satisfaction was audible. The cold satisfaction of a job well done._

 

When Gabriel woke this time, his wife was still sleeping. Though cold sweat stood on his forehead, he must have been silent through the nightmare. He was not afraid, now that he had woken up. Instead he felt a grim sense of purpose.

He dragged himself to the bathroom, and nothing he saw in the mirror surprised him. Neither the faded scar right in the center of his forehead, which he wouldn't have noticed had he not known it to be there, nor the black blood seeping from his nose.

He took pen and paper—somehow, the computer seemed inappropriate for his purpose, now—and began to write, staining the sheets black.

 

When dawn came, whatever had possessed him left him, and he let the pen fall from his exhausted fingers. He had written at a furious pace, his usually intelligible handwriting becoming a mere scrawl as the tip of the pen raced across sheet after sheet of paper, struggling to keep up with his frantic thoughts. The first draft was finished. He knew he would barely edit it—its rough form was somehow intrinsic to the feelings of fear it evoked in him, and those the essence of the work. He knew now how the doctors must have felt when they had buried their stitched-together monstrosities in the ground to let them heal and become one with their transplants. Something had been finished, and he didn't know its exact consequences yet. A sense of accomplishment mixed with anticipation filled him, and he felt whole.

He looked outside the kitchen window, to the pink eastern sky, and shattered into a thousand terrified pieces. Right across the street, a man with a cane walked, his face hidden behind a metal mask, his confident stride causing his long black leather coat to billow behind him. The doctor was coming to get him.

Animal instincts screamed at him to run, to hide, but he knew what happened to all of the doctors' experiments in the end, and he knew he could not escape. His hand was shaking as he grabbed the longest kitchen knife he could find. The doctors were immune to old age, but not immortal. In some ways, they were more fragile than normal human beings, and if he could surprise them - sneak up on them...

That was when he realized what was wrong: Only one doctor had been outside, but the three of them were always together. At the creak of the bedroom door, he whirled around. There was another one of them just coming out of the bedroom, his metal mask stained with blood. Gabriel lunged, screaming, and drove the blade between two ribs right into the monster's heart.

With a dull thud, the body fell to the ground. Gabriel stood there, breathing heavily, for three seconds, until he realized that he had just stabbed his wife to death. There was no doctor outside, and there might not have ever been. With an exhausted groan, he fell to his knees and began to cry.

 

_"Be still". The voice was just as distorted, but sounded different than the surgeon. Less inhuman, calmer. Gabriel felt the leather straps being loosened, but he was too weak to sit up._

_"Where are you taking me?"_

_"To safety. My colleagues had planned on performing additional procedures with you, but I prefer a more moderate approach. Fewer transplants mean a higher chance of Success."_

_Something about the voice of the doctor indicated that "success" was more than just a simple word to them. Gabriel thought about it as the doctor carried him out. Did success mean he would survive?_

_"I will make it seem as though you had escaped. Should my colleagues come to find you again, however, I will not hinder them in hunting you down. You will forget the operation and all of my words, but you will remember to be careful." The distorted voice sounded almost soothing._

_"Who are you?" Gabriel asked. His voice was so weak with pain and exhaustion he almost couldn't hear the words himself._

_"Among the Dread Doctors, I am known as the Geneticist, but the name I discarded was McCammon."_

_"Thank you."_

_"I am not helping you out of goodwill. This action enables the highest chance of Success. Now sleep, and forget."_

 

Gabriel woke up. He had been truly exhausted after last night, after burying his wife's corpse somewhere in the woods. Today, he would call the police that she had gone missing. After long deliberation, it seemed like the wisest course. If he confessed to have stabbed his wife because of hallucinations, he would certainly lose his status as Dr. Gabriel Valack, respected member of the medical community.

Gabriel scratched at the skin of his forehead, feeling at the soft hollow of the scar, where there was no bone beneath the skin. It had begun to itch as the headaches had grown worse and worse over the last few weeks. Longingly he gazed at the drill he had bought yesterday. It would have to wait until the disappearance of his wife had blown over, until a strange head injury wouldn't risk police suspicions. But then... then he would get to uncover what they had buried. He already knew that this would be the final step, that he would become something more.

He took the stack of paper beside his bed and labeled the title page: "The Dread Doctors. By T. R. McCammon".

He smiled at the irony. A book that uncovers secrets, attributed to one who hid his intentions even from his only allies. Would they turn against the Geneticist, when they found this book? If they ever found it. It wasn't exactly bound to become a best seller. Nonetheless, causing internal strife within a group like that could only be for the greater good.

 

_"Did he believe it?"_

_"I am certain. If he ever remembers, he will think I have betrayed you both and kept his location secret."_

_The Surgeon nodded and turned to the Pathologist. "And the implanted suggestions?"_

_"His mind did not reject them. When the dreams surface and he begins to remember, almost two decades from now, he will begin to write a book. If everything succeeds, that book will be a most powerful tool of manipulation. A virus of the mind."_

_"We wait, then. Inevitably, Success is approaching."_

_"Success is inevitable", the other two echoed back._


End file.
